The Journalist-Engineer
medium.com
medium.com
The data comes from somewhere, and I'd really like to see data-engineer-journalists be a bit more skeptical about where that data comes from and how it was collected / sampled / modified before going into visualisations.
I think that's the one part of the journalist's toolkit that hasn't made its way into the coding side yet - the ability to step back and say do we trust this data? How do we verify? Can we talk to the people who collected this? If it's collected by a government agency, under who's funding was this done? How do we fact check a graph that composes of an aggregate of population statistics, for example?
In old school narrative journalism, someone (usually an intern) calls up all the sources, looks into the government departments who gives the stats, tries to find third parties from universities or other non-related parties to cross reference ideas, statements, facts. How do we do that in a data driven world?
It's a good angle and someone ought look into it. Potential for more data-driven stories.
This point comes up a lot...there's a tension in making the data say something interesting that will get traffic/spread, which might undermine the rigor that goes into real data-analysis/data science/academic work.
IMO, as long as we disclose the source and preface the biases/problems, I'm ok with data that isn't perfect (after all, there's no such thing as a perfect data set).
The lyrical analysis that I did for rappers would never work in academia...the data set wasn't strong enough. But, it was good enough for the Internet as a side-project, and I think that most readers understood the integrity issues with the data (which I also highlighted in the narrative).
But yea, really good points about journalistic standards for coders who write journalism-esque content.
I can't say it's what I expected to be doing but news organizations are in a period of massive change and it's an interesting space to be in.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/syrian-refugees-technolo...
Useful to tell better stories and retain readers, these widgets are also a great engagement boost. :-)
I've had reporters say "I found some data, can we do something with it" and it's not nearly as useful as "I'm writing a story about X, how can we use this data to visualize Y to illustrate X?". It's amazing just how rare that understanding can be from traditional media folks.
First of all, none of the projects you mention are "99% code." They all take a ton of reporting and editorial decision-making, and they all require a deep understanding of the topics they cover. Given the full breadth of any given interactive feature, it's really more like ~10% code.
Also: "News organizations had to accept that code-driven content wouldn’t have a viable print-version. The NY Times launched a data-led blog, The Upshot, to address this tension." Really? That's why they launched the Upshot? Not to leverage their already-existing graphics desk to compete with 538 after Nate Silver left the NYT? Also, most interactive graphics you see on the NYT site also appear in print in some form.
Also: "Michael Bloomberg is subsidizing all of Bloomberg Business’s engineers in the Editorial Department. No one else is even close to making a head-count commitment." I'm not actually sure what you're trying to say here. Bloomberg's graphics desk, while very good, is actually relatively small. And they do not come from some engineering corner of the company; they're people who are experts in creating editorial graphics and interactives, and they work in the newsroom.
I'm glad you're excited about the work you cited in your post. I am too! It just seems you're missing a lot of context here.